by John Walters
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A Medium Happy 85th to everyone’s favorite North Dakotan, Angie Dickinson
Starting Five
Wild Cards
St. Louis won the Missouri Lottery last night. Its game-winning hit was a double that smacked off the lottery sign in left field, which should have been ruled a ground-rule double, thus preventing the winning run (the baserunner was between second an third) from scoring The umps missed it.
So who’s going to advance to what my old friend Matt Eagan dubbed, a full decade before MLB created it, “The Death Game?” In the A.L. it’s hard to go against Toronto and Baltimore, both 87-72, but there is a potential hot mess looming. The Blue Jays visit Fenway, where Boston will be resting its top guns, while the Orioles visit the Yankees, who will give them a fight.
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Miguel Cabrera (36 HR, 105 RBI) has been cleared for takeoff
Detroit (85-73)visits last-place N.L. club Atlanta, but the Braves have actually won 9 of 10. Keep in mind: Detroit’s game with Cleveland yesterday was rained out. If the Tigers are within half a game of either Baltimore or Toronto on Monday morning, they’ll play the Indians at Comerica on Monday. If they win, they’ll play a playoff to get to the playoff on Tuesday—I think. If they win that, there’s the A.L. wildcard game on Wednesday. If they win that, they’ll most likely travel to Texas to play the Rangers on Thursday.
So, from Sunday through Thursday, the Tigers could be looking at games in Atlanta, Detroit, Baltimore, Toronto (or vice-versa on these two) and then Arlington.
In the N.L., it’s simpler, but it’s still anyone’s call as three teams are within two games of one another. The Mets visit Philly, the Cards host Pittsburgh, and the Giants host an already-clinched Los Angeles. Color me as pulling for the Mets and Giants, both of whom are ahead of the Cards.
2. USA Today Goes Never Trump
More than a few of the men pictured here were in the midst of their last day on earth. One of their peers wrote a pretty insightful piece on the GOP candidate.
The “Nation’s Newspaper,” which has never endorsed a presidential candidate since it began operations in the early 1980s, posted an editorial early this morning in which it disendorsed (Is that a word?) Donald Trump.
“This year, by unanimous consensus of the Editorial Board, one of the candidates…is unfit for the presidency,” the editorial states. Among other things, the articles writes in boldface type that Trump “traffics in prejudice” and that “he is a serial liar.”
Meanwhile, I’d advise reading this essay by The New Yorker’s eminence grace, 96 year-old baseball writer AND World War II veteran Roger Angell, who remarks that Trump’s incident with the Purple Heart back in August was a defining moment. I’ve always thought so, too.
Also meanwhile, Megyn Kelly has gone TOTALLY off the FOX reservation. Here she is scolding Kellyanne Conway last night. There’s a moment early when Kelly says, “Kellyanne, c’mon,” which is how white folks says, “Ni**er, please.” I mean, this is on FOX. In prime time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kI_PliXWoI
And here’s Howard Stern on Trump and the Iraq War. This should be self-evident to all by now, but just in case someone out there isn’t paying attention: The point isn’t whether or not Trump supported the Iraq War (a lot of good people were duped by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld), it’s that there’s documented evidence that he did, that there is no documented evidence that he did not before the war began, and yet, faced with the audio evidence, he still will obfuscate the truth.
So look at it this way: If this is how brazenly Trump lies when the truth is evident to all, imagine how much the truth matters to him when it is not as crystal-clear.
3. Putt Up or Shut Up
I thought for sure when I first heard about this, considering that the Ryder Cup will be staged in Chaska, Minn., this weekend (let’s pour one out for His Purpleness), that is was either occasional MH contributor Bill Hubbell or his brother-in-law (who’s married to frequent MH contributor Katie). But no, it was North Dakotan David Johnson. Props to European pros Rory McIlroy, Justin Rose and Andrew Sullivan for pulling the heckler out of the gallery and giving him the opportunity to have a moment he’ll never forget.
4. “And I Wonder, Still I Wonder, Who’ll Stop the Train?”*
*The judges apologize to any Soul Asylum fans reading this, and we know who you are, who’d hoped we’d go in another song direction.
A commuter train in Hoboken, N.J., fails to come to a stop as it pulls into the station yesterday morning, leaving a 34 year-old woman who had been standing on the platform dead. The engineer, Thomas Gallagher, a 29-year veteran of NJ Transit, is hospitalized. I’m going to go ahead and assume Gallagher was not chanting “Allah Akbar” as the train pulled into the station, but America’s favorite alt-right-handed pitcher, Curt Schilling, may beg to differ.
I am hoping to be wrong. But given a train ran at high speed INTO the station, I am going to say terrorism. If I’m wrong cool.
— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) September 29, 2016
5. The Legend of Dan Cooper
Back for another installment of “The Rest of the Story…” You may already have known this, but I just learned it. In the Fifties there was relatively obscure comic book called “Dan Cooper” about a Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot. He was very adept at ejecting from planes and surviving.
Then, in 1971, a man identifying himself as Dan Cooper boarded a Northwest Orient flight from Portland to Seattle and handed a flight attendant a ransom note. He told her that he had a bomb in his briefcase, and showed it to her, and demanded $200,000. That man, who later parachuted from the plane after it landed in Seattle and he forced the flight crew to remain on board and fly him south, is known to us as D.B. Cooper.
Dan’s the man
How did the famed hijacker, who was never found, come to be known as D.B. if he was listed on the passenger manifest as Dan? A single AP writer got the name wrong, and papers all over the country repeated it. And it never was properly corrected.
Anyway, it’s most likely that “Dan Cooper” lifted his nom de criminale from that comic, as he was so inspired, and it’s most likely that he landed in a lake, in late November, near the Washington-Oregon border. He most likely drowned or froze to death first.
Medium Happy’s editorial board is always searching for cool Paul Harvey-type stories. Feel free to write in with historical notes such as this one and yesterday’s and pitch suggestions. We’ll pay you nothing, but there may be a commemorative MH sponge in it for you.
Music 101
Orinoco Flow
“Sail away, sail away, sail away….” Did New Age even exist, as a genre or a cultural phenomenon, before Enya wafted into our lives? The Irish singer’s tune hit No. 1 on the UK singles chart for three weeks in the autumn of 1988, but it’s really a tune out of time. It doesn’t belong to an era as much as it does to a mystical place. I really would have liked to see The Ramones cover it. This is a song (and album, Watermark) that gave birth to a million yoga studios. Anyway, the Orinoco is a very long river that runs through Colombia and Venezuela out into the Atlantic. Columbus happened upon it in 1498.
Remote Patrol
No. 7 Stanford at No. 10 Washington
ESPN 9 p.m.
Jake Browning has thrown 14 TDs and just two picks in U-Dub’s 4-0 start
Give the Cardinal credit:They’re in the midst of a four-week gauntlet that sees them playing three difficult road games: at UCLA, at the Huskies, and in two weeks at Notre Dame (we know, we know…that was supposed to be a difficult road game). The Huskies have looked impressive, but who have they played? No one. The Cardinal have already taken down USC and the Bruins. Note: Christian McCaffrey has never scored a touchdown away from Palo Alto.
Have not had a chance to finish the entire documentary in one sitting (about 3/4 of the way through), but I think Frontline did a tremendous job on its documentary of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump the other night .
Also, I am extremely surprised with the McCaffrey note. Besides his touchdown versus Iowa in the Rose Bowl, he has in fact never scored a touchdown outside the confines of Palo Alto. A long season still ahead, but imagine a first round RB being drafted without ever scoring a TD outside the state of California.
Baseball’s silly switch to two wild cards per league was intended to create “excitement” for the teams/cities that might not otherwise be in the playoff race come late September. Right, excitement. Winning percentages and records over the last 10 games for teams in the wild card hunt:
Mets (.535) 5-5
Giants (.528) 5-5
Cardinals (.522) 5-5
Orioles (.547) 5-5
Blue Jays (.547) 6-4
Tigers (.538) 7-3
Mariners (.535) 6-4
The “wild card race” = mediocre teams playing mediocre baseball. Four will have to make the postseason, whether they play all that well or not down the stretch, because those are the rules. The problem is that it dilutes the playoffs, which in baseball is a big deal because lesser teams beat better teams in the playoffs all the time. A wild card team made the World Series every year from 2002-07; five wild cards have won the World Series; and twice the World Series has featured two wild card teams, including Giants-Royals in 2014. Neither of those teams even won 90 games that year.
Since the strike year of ’94, only three times have the teams with the best record in each league made the World Series, the last being Red Sox-Cardinals in 2013.
So this mild excitement down the stretch could end up costing us the chance to see the Cubs in the World Series – it’s easy to see a scenario where the Giants stumble into the playoffs, play decently well over 4-7 games and knock out the best story in baseball in many years. If we get a Blue Jays-Mets, or Tigers-Cardinals World Series, don’t be surprised.
“So this mild excitement down the stretch could end up costing us the chance to see the Cubs in the World Series…”
When a wild card team beats a divisional winner in the playoffs in a 7-game series, how much is that the fault of baseball? Would baseball be more interesting if the teams with the best records throughout the entire season always made the World Series? I suppose I am just unsure what your qualms are with this.
When you are given seven chances to beat a team four times, I think skill plays a big role. This isn’t March Madness, where one bad game ruins the entire season. Would the Cubs in the World Series be a great story? Sure. Would the Cubs defeating the Red Sox in game 7 of the World Series (in Boston) be a great story? Yes. You can’t just give the kid the cookie, though.
My philosophy is fairly simple in these situations. Don’t want to see a wild card team win the World Series? Beat them.
And remember: this isn’t the NBA postseason.
Ah, speaking of the “NBA postseason”, I watched the 2nd half of Finals GAME 7 last night on NBA-TV. I hadn’t seen a replay since early July & found myself tense/excited/nauseous/ecstatic all over again! The Block, the Shot, the Stop. It was GLORIOUS! 🙂
The MLB postseason is set to begin on Tuesday (October 4). If the MLB postseason replicated the NBA postseason (65 days), the World Series champion would be crowned on December 7. THE SEVENTH OF DECEMBER!
Alas, enjoy the nostalgia, Susie B. I hear there is a “super team” being brewed in the Bay Area.
I’m still hoping for the “rest of the story” about you current book of choice. Does it go into what happened when the ship was located & some (most?) of the gold was recovered in 1988? I only vaguely remember reading something (back in college) about that ship disaster & how it “led” to the Panic of 1857. Altogether, I’m shocked this tale has not yet been made into a movie, especially with a theme of the ‘effects’ of gold on humans, both in the mid 19th century & the latter 20th century.
I am shocked to learn CMcC has NO Away Game TDs! Here’s hoping that stat changes tonight! Show no mercy, Christian!
I guess in this age of “technology” we take it for granted that trains won’t actually plow into a station unless deliberately guided. I confess being one of the ignorant populace who just assumes a “computer” takes over the entrance/exits to train stations these days, but I really have no idea. Anyone?
And, ahem, I have a question. 1st, I recognize the tragedy of 3 young lives being senselessly cut short in a “boating accident”. 2nd, I know next to nothing about boating but would think ‘joy-boating’ at 1-3AM is pretty stupid at any time & especially if the waves were choppy & it had been recently raining which I read was the case in Miami over the weekend. For more than 24 hours, a watcher of ESPN never learned the circumstances of Fernandez’ death beyond “boating accident”. Instead, one was informed of his career, his stats, his story of getting out of Cuba, what had been his bright pro future, & lastly, how all of Miami was in shock & mourning. I found the LACK of information at 1st frustrating & then suspicious. WHY would they not at least mention where/when he died? Since I don’t normally read about baseball, I may have missed it, but has ANYone in the media actually criticized Fernandez for being out there in the 1st place?
Jacob – “Would baseball be more interesting if the teams with the best records throughout the entire season always made the World Series?” My answer: Yes. If the only the very best teams make the playoffs, you get a champion that was one of those very best, rather than a middle-tier team that got hot. This happens far more in baseball than in any other sport, meaning that baseball, more than other sports, should limit the number of teams in the playoffs. The bottom seeds in the NBA playoffs practically never win even a single series, much less the title, but it happens all the time in baseball. Remember that for 100 years+, baseball only allowed division (or league) champions in the playoffs, meaning that those great Yankee teams of the 40s and 50s, the A’s and Reds of the 70s, etc., – they never had to run the risk of getting knocked off by a wild card, and I think baseball was better for it.
“When you are given seven chances to beat a team four times, I think skill plays a big role.” Not as big as you might think – that’s why all those wild cards have advanced over the years. Baseball is just different. (And of course, the divisional series are best of five – I didn’t make that clear above.)
“This isn’t March Madness, where one bad game ruins the entire season.” It’s a lot closer to March Madness than you think. In a best-of-five or best-of-seven series, the better team wins far less frequently than you might think, especially when the lesser team has a dominant starting pitcher.
I just think baseball, under the money-driven theory that MORE playoffs are better than LESS playoffs, sacrifices its 162-game season, and often finds itself with a champion that was far from its best team.
Wally,
The only way you can eliminate a “mediocre” team from getting hot is to completely withdraw from the idea of a wild card and just award postseason bids to divisional winners. In the MLB this year, that’d be fine. But if they did that last year, two of the top three teams in the MLB regular season (Cubs and Pirates) would have not made the World Series. Were those wild card teams considered mediocre?
It would be interesting to go back in time and see how each year played out. To be honest, though, I really don’t want to put the time and effort into doing that at the moment. So I’ll let my ignorance take me only so far.
You could just eliminate divisions and just have the top four teams from the NL and AL advance to the postseason.
Ever year will produce different results. There is no such thing as a “perfect” system.
And I’m going to be crucified for this, but besides a few outlier years, how many times did college football produce a champion not worthy of being named a champion in the BCS system? Were there a lot of “What ifs?” Sure. But there will always be “What ifs.”
Money will always sway the opinion to add more teams.
My preferred playoff procedure: the 1969-93 system of four divisions. Only division champs advance. LCS and World Series only. Does that leave out some really good teams? Yes (the famous example being the ’93 Giants, who won 103 games and missed the playoffs because the Braves won 104). And this year, it means that teams like the Dodgers, Red Sox or Indians would be out (depending on how the divisions were constituted). But it sure makes the 162-game season more meaningful, and why play every day for six-plus months otherwise? And it would mean not having to hold the biggest games of the year in late October/early November.
I understand, by the way, that this ship has sailed, and she ain’t coming back to port. Baseball considers the move to wild cards one of the singular achievements of the Selig era, and there’s too much $ to be made from playoff baseball.
Of course, the highest-profile sports league in the world, the English Premier League, has NO playoffs at all. Win the most regular season games and you’re the champ, even if it means (as it does in most years) that there is little intrigue at the very end of the season. That would never fly in the U.S. – we love the spectacle of postseason too much (that’s why the college football playoff was inevitable, and why it’s only going to expand).
Thanks for pointing out that ’93 Giants team. I’ll have to look more at the history of the baseball postseason to hold even a semi-interesting conversation with you. Thanks for bearing with me (and educationing me in the process),
“…would have not made the postseason.”
The Cubs went 15-13 against teams that would be in the NL Playoffs today.
Mets: 19-21
Dodgers: 20-16 (with 3 to play)
Giants: 17-20 (with 3 to play)
Washington: 19- 20
It’s not like the Cubs crushed everyone.
Kids,
Don’t make me pull this blog over….